to think they could have a shock and awe take out kiev in four days and and that was crazy to begin
with and people had advised him and that was crazy and yet he did it and he did it probably
because you know we had asked him to pump oil or we had told him not to hit these uh cyber targets
but these cyber attacks were okay or we we put a a temporary hold on offensive weapons again but
whatever the problem is he's not acting rational and i'm not saying that's an excuse that you don't
yourself be rational i'm all for pushing him out of ukraine i'm just suggesting that when you have
a lot of people talking about cross-border operations under mother russia on its land
whatever the justified pretext then you're you have escalated whether that's the right word or
not you're in a new situation because i don't think the nuclear scenario is as likely as it
was a few weeks ago because i don't think that the russian military would carry out the order
uh if putin were together and that he he would need their compliance it's a two-key system effect
but i think there are other aspects of our strategy that are risky that aren't getting
as much attention so if you think about the the explicit strategy of weakening russia if you
think about where we're going with this i think it's into pretty dangerous um unknown territory
earlier today i was speculating on another call about the point at which we would make uh
missiles available to the ukrainians to sink uh more of russia's black sea fleet within minutes
the story broke on reuters that that's exactly what we're thinking of doing to end the blockade
of odessa so the escalation of this war not just in terms of the tens of billions of dollars that
the u.s has now committed to the ukrainian war effort but in terms of the quality and scale of
weaponry we're making available to kiev i think is is leading us into somewhat uh unknown territory
what do we mean by weakening russia are we clear in our minds that regime changes
in fact a desirable objective uh it seems to to me that the by administration is quite open to that
and i don't think biden's warsaw speech was a slip of the tongue the entire speech was in fact a call
for another 1989 uh to happen but but this is actually very risky and by the standards of
cold war one uh it's almost done fathomably risky uh at the time of the first cold war no american
president would have called for the overthrow of the russian leader i also think we we have to ask
ourselves what the grand strategy is here and this is a question i'd like to throw at victor and hr
are we fundamentally using ukraine uh as a proxy war to signal to china
keep your hands off taiwan there are certainly people in the administration who think that way
it is not an accident that joe biden is off to asia visiting us allies in asia i think part of
what is driving the armament of ukraine is in fact a strategy that is mainly concerned with china
but one consequence of this is of course to drive russia entirely into the arms of china and ensure
that the russian resources will be available at bargain basement prices to the chinese government
so my sense is it's not so much the nuclear threat i'm less worried about that than i was a few weeks
ago it's more that i'm not quite sure where this takes us but you're absolutely right victor to
emphasize that it's a risky strategy that's being pursued here and i must say when i hear
the french president and the german chancellor say we should really be trying to get a ceasefire now
i'm inclined actually to agree with that i i i don't like where we're going here because i think
it's fraught with with risk ukraine uh everybody i think supports the idea of helping ukraine
but there is a golden mean there when you're just eliminating debate basically and rushing
through 40 billion dollars and you have people like colonel venman talking about offensive
operations inside russia people are forgetting that this is the first land war in history in
which a nuclear power is directly involved on the european continents never happened before
and the idea that we have some zealots that want you know no-fly zones so there's
there's going to be a situation where at some point the ukrainians i think because of
their they're drawing on a billion person nato and it's you know a lot of resources and weaponry and
for some reason thank god the russians are not hitting those supply lines as they come across
the border they're not able to or they're not doing it but as ukraine gets small uh stronger
and stronger and there's internal divisions inside russia that i think are going to start to appear
they're going to have an existential question about these border predominantly russian-speaking
borderlands that were illegally acquired by putin they're probably at some point be able to
to do make some pretty good progress and then they're going to have a problem and that is they
keep going across the border and saying god did this or something and attack russia and how and
what do you do i mean what is the idea so victor why are you portraying ukraine as an aggressor
i know you said what you said they're going across the border i mean
you're hidden inside russia they have to hit inside russia yeah right okay they have to hit
i agree but i'm saying i didn't say they were an aggressor i said they did operations inside
a nuclear power i'm not talking about morality or anything else i'm just talking about real politic
if you've got a a nuclear power involved in a land war controlled by somebody who is pretty ill
and you're conducting operations to limit his aggression but inside russian territory
and you're doing it through u.s intelligence and you have people in the u.s intelligence community
that are leaking that they're bragging about taking out an assassinating general then you're
sit you're getting to a situation in which you're really upping the ante we've never been in that
situation before why does anybody think that the russian people don't support the idea that and i
disagree with them but why would they think that they would go to war and then lose not only the
war but they would lose the area that they seized and when we talk about crimea i understand that
ukraine and everything but there is some notice i mean in world war ii the 100 000 russians were
killed in van manstein's siege of sebastopol they have this i mean there's graves all over that
area they have some history there so the idea that we're going to expel them all over great it sounds
great on for it but that's going to require a commitment that's well beyond what we have
now and neil pointed out about i think rightly so offensive you're going to have to stop all
supply by seed to the crimea and that means you're going to have to take out a lot of russian ships
you